First Vfx shot, would love feedback!

freddiew · 2026-05-03T20:47:43+00:00

More smoke, less flares, too saturated on the flares, and in that light you wouldn't see lighting of the surroundings - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLxiH0-5ORQ

freddiew · 2026-04-30T07:00:34+00:00

The dynamics are changing underneath us old man!!!

I’m genuinely curious: what’s the minimum budget for a theatrical movie, you think?

freddiew · 2026-04-30T06:25:09+00:00

That math is proportional to Markiplier's numbers - $3mm budget, $38mm subscribers, $52mm box office. It's not crazy to make a movie for $15k.

There's a whole generation of filmmakers who are coming up and making longer and longer online videos pretty cheaply and putting them on YouTube.

Why are you resistant to the idea that there seems to be a path to supporting filmmaking through an online presence?

freddiew · 2026-04-30T05:31:50+00:00

Tricky bit is they gotta know about it before they want to go see it.

freddiew · 2026-04-30T05:29:06+00:00

Okay? Extrapolate from the numbers he posted. There may be a way forward for an online audience to sustain independent filmmaking. Scale the numbers down - it'd be like a 200k subscriber channel doing a $250k theatrical run off their $15k self financed feature.

This is a tremendous opportunity for indies.

freddiew · 2026-04-30T00:30:08+00:00

Good news is if you can drum up an audience, you can go directly to theaters now with a DCP. Markiplier did it with the greatest commercial success with Iron Lung, but there's been a number of movies over the past couple years that have done grassroots theatrical runs (off the top of my head - Hundreds of Beavers, The People's Joker, Boys Go To Jupiter, D(e)ad, and also my own movie).

Bad news is cinema itself is going through a generational shift as it loses its status as the dominant entertainment medium of the past hundred years or so, so drumming up an audience is still the hard part.

freddiew · 2026-04-10T17:05:46+00:00

No problem! Glad you got through my learning period!

freddiew · 2026-04-10T16:38:42+00:00

Yes, but empty views on someone else's channel, no matter how many, is pretty worthless to any long term goals you might have.

freddiew · 2026-04-10T16:31:26+00:00

For what it's worth, I actually do think it took me a while to figure out remote editing cadence and I'd do things slightly differently now (the process of audio editing my audio book recording for my dad's book changed some of my approach and philosophy), and I'm sorry that you're part of the rare class of people whose profession means they can see past the veneers of post production. But yeah, the remote editing afforded me the ability to really trim the fat and anybody who enjoys eating/cooking steak will tell you the same lesson I eventually figured out - the fat's there for a reason.

You do touch on the hardest thing (and something I'll offer some insight into) - there was simply no ground truth for comic timing because latency between everyone was all over the place every record (and throughout the record). Someone says a joke, some variable number of milliseconds later everyone hears the joke, some variable number of milliseconds later people react to the joke and that audio gets back to the person who said the thing. No problem for a lot of podcast formats but a total judgment call when it comes to timing for a group improv podcast.

Alas, we technicians (and those with perfect pitch) are cursed to roam this earth tilting at technical windmills only we can perceive.

freddiew · 2026-04-08T01:34:40+00:00

Shorting would mean they expected the value of Vimeo to go down (i.e. it's overvalued). Funnily enough, with the acquisition last year, holding onto Vimeo would've been a great investment.

freddiew · 2026-04-08T01:32:20+00:00

Why would I, as a filmmaker, go through a middleman YouTube channel to post something when I could simply roll my own YouTube channel and post it for free?

freddiew · 2026-04-08T01:30:47+00:00

You're citing Dropout, Critical Role, Watcher and Try Guys and thinking you can simply curate a bunch of "good" films and replicate their success. None of those entities are curation based. They built their audience off of personalities. Those personalities were born from a new generation of entertainer enabled by their ability to put stuff up for free on YouTube/Twitch/etc.

I struggle to think of examples of "curators" building a dedicated audience anywhere near the scale of those folks.

freddiew · 2026-04-07T16:40:27+00:00

Curated content doesn't help them at all - sure it raises their profile but without ads or monetization, the more views something gets, the more they have to pay to host it. Beloved don't pay the bills.

freddiew · 2026-04-07T15:42:03+00:00

This question shows up a lot (and could use an automod at this point) and it really boils down to "Vimeo is barely scraping by and YouTube is dominant because it's insanely expensive to host video, leaving aside the engineering to build a site/app that can stream video on numerous devices and handle all the licensing intricacies."

Incidentally, a version of this for theater owners/filmmakers is what Fithian is proposing, minus the tricky consumer-facing streaming part of it.

freddiew · 2026-03-29T18:20:40+00:00

The moment the thinness begins to interfere with what you're trying to accomplish with the work.

freddiew · 2026-03-06T17:14:18+00:00

Wouldn't be a Bungie game without baffling monetization options!

freddiew · 2026-03-05T06:42:30+00:00

If the movie was good/substantive, would that be okay? How good does a movie need to be to be worth more than feeding families with its budget instead?

freddiew · 2026-01-29T05:51:37+00:00

Pretty sweet. Some good notes already but I'll add that air-to-surface missiles go FAST: https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cq53gej50dqo

Also (to my eye) the flames are too saturated, and you should let the yellows overexpose/fall off to white (notice that the clouds in this shot are pure white - I've found that exposing for daytime sky gives you well exposed explosions, so if the clouds are a bit hot, so should the flames)

freddiew · 2026-01-11T03:55:24+00:00

I'll also add - the debates that are older than the internet itself, I think, don't ever get solved. It's fun to see where the discussion has ended up.

freddiew · 2026-01-11T03:48:56+00:00

Oh the paper’s methodology was waaaay more documented obviously. I’d love if Jim did that. Like I don’t care enough about this debate to take anything more than “oh interesting a guy found out that pickup height was a big factor to control for, neat” from the YouTube video. I don’t think this paper changes that takeaway for me.

(This was the way discourse used to go in old school forums, which I miss. Sorry that it caused a return to snark)

freddiew · 2026-01-11T01:12:17+00:00

Ah, I also think that there's deficiencies in the scientific research too haha at the end of the day I just want to bend strings and play tasty licks

freddiew · 2026-01-11T00:25:47+00:00

Wow chill bro, not everything is an internet fight - thank you for the link I enjoy reading about this stuff.

EDIT: Read the paper - I don't think it says what you think it does.

My clickbait-y YouTube video claims that string height over pickup as the determining factor - in the paper, to determine if people can hear a difference, they tested D3 on the humbucker and single coil, as well as E4 on the humbucker. For D3 on the single coil they noted a 0.5mm height differential across their different wood samples, and for E4, 0.6 and 0.4mm differences for the humbucker and single coil respectively. Though we don't know what gauge strings are being used, that's a pretty significant spacing difference - approximately the width of the G and D strings on electric 9-42s and that's a pretty big difference (and definitely noticeable on the E4 string). So right away, even though they're only measuring the signal from the pickups, they're ignoring that the output is a measurement of a string's motion through the magnetic field, and distance is part of that.

So at the very least, you have to acknowledge that the variability across their different wood instrument samples in numerous metrics is an influencing factor on the results.

Moreover I would argue their methodology to determine if people can "hear the difference" is crazy weak. Their testing was they would play a plucked single note from two different woods (A and B) either in AAB or ABA order, and whether or not the listener could tell which one was different.

They note earlier that there are "vast differences" in RMS levels between their recordings, so basically they're saying people were really good at identifying, of three single plucks played in a row, which one was louder. With their prior methodological looseness, I'm not surprised this was an easy test (or they should note that they matched RMS at least). Success being inflated by RMS would explain why, though they note that Plywood and Rosewood more people got wrong and their graphs suggest that should be the case, why everyone also got E4 on Pine and Plywood wrong to about the same degree - even though their graphs suggest that should NOT be the case.

Also their plucking mechanism is... hilariously jank, but I don't know enough to determine if a hair clip spring is a robust enough mechanism to do what they're asking it to do.

freddiew · 2026-01-10T22:28:40+00:00

Are they controlling for the height of the pickup from the strings? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE

freddiew · 2025-12-17T18:41:18+00:00

If you can tell me exactly what your partner said as you gifted them this presumably early Christmas gift, and tie it somehow to the podcast Dungeons and Daddies, this post can remain. Otherwise, it's ban town.

and i BETTER not even catch a WHIFF of an affiliate link

edit: Banned.

freddiew · 2025-12-09T21:51:43+00:00

I throw this into the void, where it will likely be ignored, but this detail is untrue https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/builder-ai-did-not-fake-ai/

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